New regulations will affect everything from scheduling to waste disposal

MAKING CHANGE Most businesses will have to absorb the costs of the city's new regulations.

For business owners, the new year means a new suite of city regulations.

City Hall has created an array of rules governing core industries—constraining scheduling by fast-food franchises, mandating safety training for construction workers and forcing some businesses to separate food waste, to name three.

"Fair workweek" laws requiring fast-food employers to post schedules two weeks in advance and not compel workers who close up at night to open the doors again less than 11 hours later took effect last month. Extra shifts must now be offered to current employees before new hires, and late schedule changes require written permission from the employee and extra pay.

One expert predicted owners would have to invest heavily not just in workers but in management staff. "The record-keeping is going to be pretty substantial," said Jason Finkelstein, an attorney with the firm Cole Schotz whose clients include restaurateurs. "You're going to have to start training and paying these guys to do a lot more administrative work."

Finkelstein also suggested it would mean there would be fewer part-time workers in the industry.

Fast-food chains and other restaurants also face a new sanitation mandate. Eateries larger than 7,000 square feet and corporate locations and franchises will have to set up bins just for food waste and hire a carter to take it to an approved disposal site. These rules, likely to begin in the middle of next year, will also apply to supermarkets of 10,000 square feet or more.

Andrew Rigie, executive director of the New York City Hospitality Alliance, noted that the changes will coincide with the minimum wage rising to $13 an hour at the end of this month and to $15 an hour a year from now. Most establishments will have to absorb some of these new costs. "There's only so much a restaurant can charge for a burger or pasta without turning off customers," he said.

The most protracted regulatory battle of the past year will weigh on the construction industry in 2018. After months of negotiations, the City Council and Mayor Bill de Blasio mandated 40 to 55 hours of safety training for laborers on all new buildings exceeding 4 stories beginning in March. Although hard-hats can obtain temporary permits to get back on the job after just 10 hours of coursework, the deal marked an enormous victory for building-trades unions, as their apprenticeships can substitute for the classes.

Even though the council will subsidize training for 4,000 nonunion workers, the Real Estate Board of New York warned that 120,000 are at risk because some contractors will decline to cover the cost. "With no sponsorship and insufficient public funding, these workers will need to pay for training out of their own pockets in order to keep working," said a REBNY spokesman.

The city did help bars and clubs by repealing the Cabaret Law—which subjected them to fines if customers danced—and establishing a nightlife advisory board and office to help red-eye establishments negotiate the city's regulatory web. But with the bulk of its $408,000 budget paying for its director and deputy, it is anyone's guess how effective it will be.

The city is hardly laissez-faire about where clubgoers can get footloose, Rigie noted. Zoning rules permit dancing at establishments only in certain commercial and manufacturing districts, and the businesses need security cameras and licensed security guards. "We now need to amend the zoning laws to expand the number of places where people can actually dance," Rigie said.

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